Along with colleagues from The Armidale School, I attended the International Conference on Teaching and Learning with Technology (iCTLT 08) in Singapore earlier this month.

iCTLT was the first conference held by the International Society for Technology in Education outside the US, and it was a fantastic opportunity to hear from leaders in the field of education about the role of technology in learning. One of the best things about this conference was that it was focused on making genuine shifts in learning and pedagogy rather than IT tools. The key theme of the conference was the significance of creativity in learning and it was cool to hear Sir Ken Robinson (of TED Talks “Do Schools Kill Creativity” fame) in person. In his keynote, Ken Robinson challenged the very nature of schools, which are geared towards producing 20th-century, industrial workers, rather than creative thinkers who will thrive in a 21st-century globalised, knowledge-rich world. He made many thought-provoking statements including that schools squash students’ potential rather than fostering it. He spoke about how the arts are devalued in education and that we need a radical transformation (rather than incremental, comfortable tinkering at the edges) away from the utility, linearity, conformity, standardization that is the hallmark of most education systems to a educational model that is based on vitality, creativity, diversity and customisation.